HISTORY DOES NOT MOVE IN STRAIGHT LINES

Seeds sown in 2025-political, economic, ecological-will bloom or wither in 2026 and beyond. What is beyond doubt is that neither India nor the world will return to familiar certainties

- SANTWANA BHATTACHARYA

WE have just completed a quarter of a new century. Twenty-five years that feel less like a milestone, more like a quick look at the clock while in the midst of a long march through exhaustion-war-torn, punctured by instability, marked by an unrelenting sense of uncertainty. All around is a landscape of rubble and unrest: Bangladesh dangerously combustible, Gaza flattened, Ukraine bleeding, Afghanistan erased from the global conscience, Sri Lanka economically battered, Pakistan politically paralysed, Myanmar crushed under military boots. Some societies lie in devastation, others struggling merely to crawl out of it.

The world itself appears directionless. It lurches between technological euphoria and existential dread-between dreams of space colonisation and the looming reality of ecological collapse, pandemics and war. We are no longer sure where humanity is headed: utopia or catastrophe. Either could be of its own making.

The disorientation runs deeper. Even language, once a stable anchor of identity, has become unsettled. Only artificial intelligence has no identity crisis. At least it admits it is still learning! Human societies, by contrast, often pretend certainty while hollowing out meaning.

Words that once bound civilisationsmoral, ethical, constitutional-sound increasingly archaic. Old ideas are dismissed as inconvenient or elitist. In their place stand shock and silence. Children are killed in conflicts with numbing regularity-in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan-and the world debates semantics rather than accountability. Both words and bullets open fire on unarmed civilians, mow down holiday crowds or worshippers. Things like that barely disrupt the news cycle. Fear exists but selectively, or fleetingly.